Generative AI has huge implications for the customer-facing strategies and business models of media organisations. Customer demand is shifting from traditional search experiences towards AI-enabled user interfaces (AI UIs) which leverage generative conversational AI. Internet users will use so-called 'answer engines' to resolve online searches that typically would have resulted in traffic to web pages - meaning a significant reduction in ad impressions and a throttling of the subscription funnel.
Big Tech incumbents are adding more AI features into their search interfaces to capitalise on this demand shift. Alongside these developments, the rise of open-source AI has also meant a lowering of the barriers to entry for AI UI search and the emergence of new competition. Perplexity AI offers an "interactive AI search companion" called Copilot which lets you provide detailed filters before it searches the web and puts results in a ChatGPT-like experience. Its UI includes real-time citations to online sources and follow-up questions. Another example is Kagi, which provides numerous features including AI which can summarise the overall results list, summarise individual pages in the results list, and answer follow-up questions about a returned result. The potential to address more complex search queries, and the processing which is performed by the AI on the results, are significantly above levels in traditional search engines.
So, the big question for media organisations is how to adapt to these new interfaces, given the historic importance of search to their business models
In many ways, media organisations have been adapting to new interfaces and disintermediation for decades. Social platforms and news aggregators have contributed to a widening gap between users and publishers for years, but the capabilities of generative AI are so significant that they have sparked new fears over disintermediation and the web browser experience as we know it.
One of the clearest and most timeless strategies that media organisations should be adopting is a “destination strategy” - where audiences have a relationship with you and come to you directly to serve their needs. In a recent interview with Decoder, NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien mentioned the word “destination” thirteen times - explaining “Our job is, number one, to obsessively focus on getting people to come to our destination and build a direct relationship with us, to register with us, to give us their email address, and to let us show up in their inbox”. This is the ultimate tool for mitigating the risk of disintermediation resulting from new interfaces.
Secondly, media organisations need to get control of their IP and “manage it fast”. There is an abundance of evidence that organisations have been (without permission) leveraging the content and data produced by media organisations. As Jon Slade (CCO of the FT) explains - “The key issue for publishers, 20 years ago, was that a lot of them gave their content away for free. And they can do that again. And we would see a similar level of disintermediation, or probably a much greater level of disintermediation, through [our content’s] synthesising and use in products that we don’t control but we have contributed to. So I think we have to remember that we’ve seen the movie before. We’ve got to get control of our IP and manage it fast.”
There are several tactical ways that media organisations can capitalise on the demand for generative AI search. Increasingly, we are seeing media organisations experiment with the following:
- Building competing and specialised AI UIs using AI models sitting on top of their own data and platforms and custom UI features designed to create a good user experience. This must be done in a way which manages risk - for example by ensuring that an article summarised by AI does not lose its accuracy or informative value.
- Monetising their content by directly licensing content or indirectly by optimising it for incoming AI searches (so-called AI-SEO) - notwithstanding ongoing contention around copyright infringement and unauthorised scraping.
- Building plugins or custom AI models which increase attribution by creating direct access to content within an external AI UI.
As mentioned, it's worth remembering that challenges to prevailing search engines are not a new thing and changes in customer behaviour are not guaranteed. However, media organisations need to act now to reduce disintermediation and take advantage of the opportunities presented by generative AI and these new interfaces.
If you’d like to learn more about the impact of AI on the Media and Publishing Industry - sign up for our webinar on the 14th of June or contact me directly.
About the author
Sam has 5 years of experience helping clients to solve strategic business challenges using data. He has helped organisations in both the public and private sectors to define strategic roadmaps and processes for using AI. He has also designed and built innovative data solutions, working with senior stakeholders as part of critical delivery-focused teams.
George is Head of Insights and Senior Manager at FT Strategies. Before this, he has spent the last four years guiding the FT’s data strategy as it balances revenue and risk. Most recently, he founded and continues to lead a cross-departmental FT team focused on the future of marketing & advertising in the context of restrictions on online tracking.
